DE LA CRUZ WAS HIDING in a shack out in the Badlands.
This I saw from the back of the cart, with only a waxing crescent moon for light. I filled a small clay bowl with water from the river we had crossed one week earlier, and I dropped into the water pebbles and two leaves I had picked up intact along the riverbed, and I pricked my finger with a sewing needle I disinfected with whiskey from the butcher’s reserves. The blood spoke of my intent. If my intent were unjust, I do not believe the water would have shown me an image of de la Cruz stirring stew over a low cook fire. I do not believe the leaves would have turned in their bath to show me the way to begin walking, nor continued to point that way once I had begun.
By now I trust you believe magick is a fickle thing. It can be. Or perhaps it is only so fickle as the one practicing its ways. But for as much of the world as I have cared to see and as easy as I have found it to leave the place I once thought of as home, I do not believe this makes me a fickle creature myself. No more than the wind is fickle, or the trees or the waters.
I did not know the exact way to take to reach de la Cruz from the road, or rather the bone-dry expanse of sand we chose to call the road, but I did know the ways around not knowing the way. How to find signs of life and match the signs to the life one hopes to find. So we drove the cart as far into the Badlands as the horses could go with the terrain as uneven as it was, and when the rocks threatened to crack the cart’s axle, we left the cart and the horses. It was not ideal for the beasts to stand in the dark, as they would bolt and take the cart with them if they spooked, but I tied their reins to a stump and left them there anyway. Reassurances of my return were like as not hollow when I took the only source of light with me.
The lantern I had found scarce need for until this night. This and the rifle we took from the back of the cart, and the butcher held the lantern while I wrapped my shawl around my shoulders and twined the divining leaves into a pendant that I hung around my neck.
“So what’s your plan?” Hawking asked before we set off into the valley.
“I’m going to knock on the door,” I said, “and he and I are going to have ourselves a chat, and he is going to tell me where I can find the man who killed my husband and took my mother.”
“You’re so sure about that.”
“No,” I said. “I ain’t.”
“How do you know you ain’t going to walk in there and find our friend waiting to dispatch your mother like—”
My glare stopped him. “She ain’t there. I’d have felt it. And neither is he.” I considered Hawking and his hollowness in the light of what I now knew about him. “You should stay with the horses and cover me.”
“I ain’t aiming to stay here while you get yourself shot.”
“Well, then, steady your hands,” I said.
“Hah.”
“And watch your mouth,” I said. “He’s outnumbered and he’s got himself an itchy trigger finger, besides.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Hawking said.
When your father and I first moved to the Nebraska Territory, the way was not well known to us, and we had to trust our path and our safety in the thin maps drawn by those who had come before us and those we met along the way. I can recall feeling safer for knowing both your father and his rifle were there. Safety is nothing for which I would barter liberty, but that I have known at least the illusion of it in the past I count as a blessing.
I knew this night I was headed into territory man had not yet charted. If an outlaw were to seek refuge in this place, he would have to have met and learned it while the sun still shone. The pendant about my neck had lifted from my bosom and pointed straight in the direction I was to go. As I walked, my nearness to the Mexican gave it ease. It lowered with time, and before it returned to lying against my chest, I saw dim firelight burning through a window in the distance.
In the darkness I knelt, and Hawking extinguished the lantern before he began to creep forward. I too crept forward, as low to the ground as I could with the weight of you in my hips. Neither of us wore spurs or carried keys, and the only person who could feel you moving was me, yet the desolation of the landscape was so stark that I was aware of every sound, felt the tapping of our bootsoles on the rocky earth or your dancing around beneath my ribs was loud as a shout. So complete was the darkness, I could no longer see the pendant made of leaves. When I began to drift away from the house, I knew because I felt its shifting. Never have I so wished for a weapon beyond my own hands.
I stopped moving and felt for a boulder I could use for support and found one sturdy in the dark. I could feel de la Cruz out there.
Until that moment, I had not thought of whether I would recognize the cadence of the man’s steps, having heard them just the once, and in a state of alarm at that. I could not hear him moving even when I strained to listen. I heard Hawking as he crept farther away, his intent to flank de la Cruz clear.
A rock popped as de la Cruz circled around the boulder I had chosen and set the pendant to turning. My eyes were soon adjusted to the darkness, and I wanted to reach for the lantern Hawking had left behind, but I did not want to alert de la Cruz to my location. We stayed like this for a time, long enough I felt as if the pendant had become a timepiece, its movement keeping with his circling around my location, neither of us daring to speak first.
I heard the clattering of his rifle’s mechanisms as he pulled back the hammer. He was nearer to me than I thought he was. His accent and hatred stained his voice. This was the man who had lied straight to your father’s face, who I counted just as responsible for the murder as the monster who had actually done the shooting.
“I know you’re here,” he said. “I can smell you.”
My dear, I wanted to hurt him then. The way he spoke to the darkness and the way he moved in it as if it and he were of a kind. To kill a man with magick is no task to take on lightly. It is difficult enough to do good with it, and to kill a man takes something from the soul of the one who does the taking. At that moment my fatigue was in part due to the demands of pregnancy and so much time on the road but in part, also, because I was preparing to kill the man with a hex.
“You show yourself,” said Lorenzo Chavez de la Cruz, “and I will not shoot you. I will shoot you if you make me come and find you. ¿Comprendes?”
If he were the sort of man to shoot at a woman heavily pregnant, then he would deserve whatever happened to him after that. This may seem to you a fair bit of recklessness, but in that moment you have to understand I was more concerned with what would happen to you than what would happen to me.
I stood from where I had crouched behind the boulder and held my palms so the Mexican could see they were empty and left the lantern on the ground behind me. Though I wore a medicine bag tied to the hem of my tunic and the pointing pendant around my neck, I knew he would not believe me unarmed otherwise. My hair was dirty and so was my face. If he thought I was there to kill him, I would not fault him, but I was not there to punish him for his thoughts.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“You don’t recognize me,” I said.
He was pointing the muzzle of his rifle in my direction, but I do not believe he had a true shot. Not in the dark and not with a flintlock weapon. Covered in dirt as I was, I could have called upon the dirt covering his palms and created heat. Made the weapon such as he could no longer hold on to it. This was an effort, and I began to make the effort.
“Nah,” he said. “Now I do. You’re the doctor’s woman.”
“What are you skulking around in the dark for?” I asked.
“I could ask you the same.”
“Well,” I said, “I was aiming to knock on the door and introduce myself proper.”
“¿Claro?” he said with a hint of cruel amusement in his tone.
“It was. Suppose it could still be.”
“Well, I suppose now I have to invite you in.”
“I suppose so, too. Unless you want to talk about your boss out here in the open.”
He lowered his rifle. In the dark I could see how he was breathing. Had been breathing all that time. He was agitated by the implication of my presence, but I could not determine whether that agitation would give way to violence easy or not.
“Por el amor del cielo,” he said. “Come inside.”
I took him up on the offer so much as I felt it was no real offer at all. My options were few. If I stayed outside, he would shoot me. So I went inside.
The place was clean but dust covered everything, as if the cleaning had occurred before a great absence, and when I breathed in deep I could not smell so much the fireplace or what he had been cooking in the fireplace but the passage of time and the smell of impending death. He had not even swept the entryway the last time he entered. I could see the tracks made in the gray by his boots, and by something else having been dragged across the floor.
On the very far side of the room was a single bed with a pallet mattress. Lying on that mattress was the still form of Kelly Mackey, buried underneath blankets and breathing the uneven, lurching breaths of a dying man. What your father said back in De Soto had come to pass. That leg of his had turned to gangrene.
If the man in black were capable of even a sliver of mercy, he would have shot Mackey before shooting your father. Maybe that was what the men were hollering about, before Hawking and I interrupted them. I would not get the chance to ask. I had not come here for Mackey.
My attention shifted from the dying man on the bed to the metal in the stock of the Mexican’s rifle, which he rested on the floor beside the fireplace. He flexed both of his hands once the weight was gone from them, and without touching them I knew they were thick with calluses and powerful.
“If you value your life,” said de la Cruz after he closed the door, “you will cease looking for George Dalton, and you will go back home.”
“My husband is dead,” I said. “Y’all shot him.”
“You were not there. You do not know what happened.”
“I was there enough to hear it.”
“George Dalton is evil.”
“So I’d gathered.”
“No,” said de la Cruz, looking right at me as he sat himself down at the table and began to roll a cigarette. “No, I do not think you understand.”
I said, “Them girls you had back in New Orleans made it sound like he was the devil, making them do things.”
“And you do not believe them.”
“Course I don’t believe them. Ain’t no such thing as the devil.”
“But you do believe in demons.”
“Spirits, sure. Not the Christian devil.”
“If I tell you that George Dalton is very old, older than this country, you will say what?”
Everything in this world, and immortality is one of them, comes with a price. Spirits are just as liable to fade away as anything else. Without feeding from the memories of their living kin, they have to subsist on the desperation of strangers. At least, that was what I thought I knew about spirits as I stood talking to de la Cruz.
I said, “I would say I’m curious to know what you mean by that. By my count that’d make him nigh unto a hundred years old, and he don’t look even half that.”
“Older,” said de la Cruz.
He began to pick his nails with the tip of a heavy-handled knife, and I eyed the blade a moment before speaking again.
“You’ll understand if I’m having trouble believing this,” I said.
“Believe, or do not believe,” he said. “It is all the same to him.”
I asked, “How long you and Mackey been riding with him?”
He said, “Mackey we picked up in Kansas City some time ago. We needed a man who was good with the horses, and he did not ask questions. No family, neither. No parents, no woman, no niños. I do not think he was ever with a woman. He owed a lot of people money, was very bad at gambling. Too trusting.”
“And what about you?”
“You really expect me to believe the devil shot my husband?”
“Not the devil,” said Chavez. “El diablo es un cuento, nada más.”
“Un cuento,” I said, scoffing. A story. “So you expect me to believe Mackey, who you brung into my house with a shot gut and a mangled leg, went from being just about dead when I left y’all alone with my husband to standing up, walking, talking, all on account of a demon who was compelling the rest of you bastards to do what y’all done, and this don’t make you even bat an eye.”
“You wish to know what happened?”
It brings me no shame to tell you I lost my composure then. I told him yes, I wished, so full of fervor that tears came to my eyes and I do believe he thought my labor pains had begun. If he thought this, it did not change the manner in which he spoke to me, and for that I grant the son of a bitch some measure of manhood. He offered me neither refreshment nor repose. We kept to our stances, he in front of the fire and I with my back to the door, and after a moment to catch both of our breaths, he doffed his hat from his head and laid it over the barrel of his gun. Dragged his hand down his face and I could see that he was sweating.
“Tell me,” I said. “Please.”
“There is not so much to tell,” he said, and lit a cigarette to keep him company throughout the telling. “He disappeared for a time, when we were in California, and when he comes back, he says he knows the location of a bruja who he has business with, and the bruja is with one of the Yankee soldiers who burned down my village. When we arrive, he hurts Mackey so that you would open the door.”
“And you just went along with him.”
He went on to tell me a story I could picture vivid in my head. If he had not chosen this life of robbery and murder, I do believe Lorenzo Chavez de la Cruz could have been a storyteller of the highest order. The man possessed a gravity and a natural way of holding an audience, even small as this one was, that belied the fact he was beginning to wear his age and was tired for it. I do not imagine life as a displaced vaquero and a Mexican soldier was easy even without the introduction of George Dalton into his tale. Perhaps without George Dalton he never would have taken to robbery. Never would have taken to murder. I believed him when he told me George Dalton was older than either of us put together. Older than Mexico. Older than Europe, maybe, or maybe just the spirit riding him was. But I did believe him.
Before they picked up Kelly Mackey outside Kansas City, they rode with a band of mercenaries who had broken free from the American army and made their way through the frontier states collecting scalps, white and Indian both, and the money that came along with them. As time passed and whiskey flowed, the men began to doubt both George Dalton’s story and his integrity. All the time he was with them, de la Cruz made as if he did not speak English. Dark skinned and wary eyed as he was, I doubt any of the mercenaries suspected the falseness in this.
As the story goes, one night the men had taken to drinking and in drinking rustled up enough foolish courage between the half dozen of them to draw their pistols and confront George Dalton. The men did not want to travel any farther west with a liar in their midst, they having enough lies to keep straight between the lot of them as it was, and that liar laughed though he had six guns trained on him. Told one of the men he would do just as well to put the bullet between his own eyes, and the man did so without hesitating. The rest of the men stood frozen a moment, and then they began to fire on George Dalton.
De la Cruz was not sure how many of them missed and how many of their shots rang true, but George Dalton pulled his own revolver and put a bullet into the heads and chests of the remaining five men. Had one bullet left by the time the gun swung around to aim at de la Cruz. He said, “You speak English just fine, don’t you?”
And de la Cruz said to him, “Claro.”
And de la Cruz said to me, “I never lied to him again. I was too afraid to lie to him. After, he asks if I would not rather go back home to my family. I tell him he knows already what happened to my family, but he wants to hear me say it.”
The words came out on their own. “Is my mother alive?”
“I don’t know, bruja. She was.”
“A week ago. When we split up.”
“Did he hurt her?”
“What do you think?”
“I ain’t thinking. I’m asking.”
“Last I saw, she was not hurt.”
“Where did he take her?”
“He did not tell me where he was going.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “You knew my husband was a medic—”
“Un médico quien ayudó a los soldados a matar mi gente.”
“He didn’t kill anyone!”
“The American army,” said de la Cruz, “killed my wife, my children, my mother. They take my horses and burn my land, all in the name of war. You think I do not know what it is to watch such a thing?”
“I don’t care if you know!” I said. “I ain’t the first person ever lost the most important thing in the world to them, and neither are you.”
“Most important thing in the world is not your spouse, chinita, or your children. Or your land. It’s your freedom, your ability to think for your own damned self. Slant-eyed bruja living in this godforsaken country, you of all people should know that.”
I hated him then. I hated him because I agreed with him and I did not want to admit to agreeing with him. Because I do not want to pass along the words of a heartless man who spoke so free because he knew his days were not numbered in his favor.
When I stepped towards him, he did not shrink back. He stood up from his chair just as easy as you please, and he grabbed me by the wrist and spun me around so that the tip of his knife bit the skin of my neck, and, my dear, I could not help but scream. He put his forearm over my windpipe then, choked off the sound, and Roger Hawking burst in the shack door even as I was unleashing the effort I had held over Lorenzo Chavez de la Cruz as a guillotine this entire time, directing it into the handle of the knife. In seconds it grew too hot for de la Cruz to hold any longer, and he dropped it with a snarl. He seized on my momentary weakness and pushed me away from him.
I broke the fall with my hands and knees, and Hawking told him to put his damned hands in the air. He put his damned hands in the air, and the men stood staring at each other for a moment. A standoff. If I moved, it would tip the balance one way or the other, and by now you should know that I am not a gambler. Hawking was. I expected he would have recognized a stacked deck when he saw one.
“Get down on the ground!” Hawking said.
“What are you going to do?” de la Cruz asked. “Shoot me?”
“You get down on the ground and stay there till we’re gone, it won’t come to that.”
I got to my feet and came to stand by the fireplace, as far out of the line of gunfire as I could given how little room the shack afforded us. It was not far enough to save my hearing, and Hawking was not fast enough to save himself.
As Hawking leveled the rifle and aimed, de la Cruz jumped out of the way and hid behind the table, which looked as if it had stood in that place longer than even the shack itself had. When he came up from hiding, he filled Hawking’s chest with lead, six shots altogether. Hawking paused a moment, his body going into shock, then shot de la Cruz in the shoulder and fell to the floor.
Though I screamed his name and went down on my knees beside him, opened up his shirt to visualize the wounds, I knew before I even reached him that he would be dead within minutes. All six of the bullets had entered his chest, three on each side, and though the wounds themselves were bleeding, the blood was not leaving his body. He realized what I was fixing to do and shook his head, same as your father had. He grabbed my hands to keep them from doing healing work, same as your father had. It did not take long for me to make sense of the wet coughing, the air he gasped in leaving his body through the holes in his chest. He was drowning in his own blood.
My dear, I could not save him. He could not speak as he lay dying on the floor, and once I realized I could not save him, I put one hand on his forehead and took his right hand in the other and I held him. I was crying as I told him it was all right, he kept you safe, it was just going to hurt for a few more minutes, I was right there with him. Anything I could think to say to keep him from dying afraid and thinking he was alone. I felt him stop fighting as the calming spell washed over him. And then I felt his consciousness leave him. And then I felt the last of his breath go out of him. And so he left me in a shack in the middle of hell with the man who killed him.
Fear and rage will grant a body strength it might not have possessed otherwise, a numb sort of freedom in acting without thought, and my body found its strength when Hawking stopped coughing and closed his eyes and ceased to be. I grabbed the rifle from where de la Cruz had propped it by the fire, and I advanced on him. Though the table stood between us, it was not enough distance for him to evade the butt of the rifle, which I used to hit him in the throat. The blow stunned him, and I hit him again in the shoulder where Hawk had already shot him, then I hit him hard in the belly, threw down the rifle, and commenced to pummel him with my fists.
My dear, I had never in my life hit a man the way I hit the man who killed Roger Hawking. The man who was as much a liar as I had expected he would be, the man who could have been either one of us for how easy it was for the monster George Dalton to control him. I hit him with my fists, and when he regained his senses enough to grapple with me, I grabbed him by the lapels of his coat.
De la Cruz swung at me with his left hand, which I did not expect. He hit me hard in the temple, sending stars exploding across my vision. So I straddled his legs to keep him from getting away and I slammed his head on the floor. He did not stop moving. I slammed his head on the floor again.
He stopped moving, and I climbed off him, and I commenced to kicking him in the ribs, and by then I expect I was crying too hard to continue wailing on him. But I did. I wailed on him until he ceased to move, and then I kicked him one more time to assure myself he had stopped moving due to unconsciousness and not due to a ruse. I walked away from his crumpled form and sank down on the floor beside Hawking and cried though my tears served no purpose. They sure as hell were not going to bring him back to life.
That would have been the last thing he wanted, anyway.
Before I burned the shack to the ground, I took from it what items I suspected would serve some purpose on a very long journey and placed them in the satchel Hawking no longer had need for. I took Hawking’s wallet and his rifle and I took de la Cruz’s heavy knife, and, though I was not hungry, I ate some of the stew left hanging over the cook fire, for I had not taken a hot meal in some time and did not wish to deprive you of what you needed to grow strong.
I found another satchel on an otherwise empty chair. The contents gave me a moment’s pause. Inside I found a box of ammunition, a compass stained with rusted blood, and a finger bone held intact with wire and grayed with age. While nothing in the satchel was of any immediate use, even the compass’s directional markings worn away and its needle refusing to point due north, I took it anyway.
Once I had stripped the house and the corpses of what I could carry, and checked to make sure de la Cruz was no longer breathing, I walked over to the bed and looked down on Kelly Mackey. He could have been no older than thirty, and though I had only seen him in this state, broken and dragged around by men who did not care for him, I could imagine he was a religious man. I could imagine a man like George Dalton having an easy way with him. That does not mean I forgave him. I do not forgive him. I pity him, however, even now. I pity him, because if he had fought back even a little, maybe none of this ever would have happened.
Though I was quite certain he would die soon enough on his own, I held a pillow down over his face. It caused him to reach up and try to remove my hands and fall away again, dead. I left the pillow where it was and considered how I was going to burn the place to the ground.
I found I could not bring myself to burn my friend’s body in the same fire as would consume de la Cruz and Mackey. So I got my hands around Hawk’s cold wrists and dragged him out into the dusty air. I breathed deep and fast, letting my mind spark the flint of hatred I still carried for the liar lain out inside. What I did is considered forbidden among the women of our line, but I figured there was no coming back from where I was headed, anyway. I used the power of my thoughts to ignite the shack and give me the light I needed to gather up firewood and kindling to build a separate pyre for Hawk.
As the flames engulfed his body, I prayed to a god neither of us believed in that Hawk would find in death whatever peace had evaded him in life, and when his body was nothing but bone and ash for the wind to take, I shouldered his rifle and walked away.
I could see the shack’s glow across the plains for over an hour after I had returned to the cart with two satchels and a dead man’s rifle. It was not a light that offered me any warmth, and I dare say whatever warmth it offered de la Cruz was nothing compared to the fires of whatever hell awaited him.